Audre Lorde tells us that naming is important. When she
introduced herself as a “Black lesbian feminist mother warrior
poet,” she was deliberately situating herself and her perspective
in a context of co-constitutive identities. Nikki Finney says,
“Repetition is holy.” Lorde’s continual refrain of her many
identities became an incantation of protection in all the spaces
she entered, grounding her and signaling to others who she was.

I identify as queer. When I call myself queer I do so with
similar intention. My favorite definition of queerness comes from
the ‘zine Towards the Queerest Insurrection :

[Q]ueer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely
another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social
categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it
is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of
stability—an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of
identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defined against the
dominant narrative of white-hetero-monogamous-patriarchy, but also
by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized, and
oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer
involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our
desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of
everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world.
Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal.

It is this definition that motivates my consideration of who and
what gets placed under the umbrella of queerness. I am concerned
about the way queer is deployed in relation to hip hop
because patriarchy, misogyny, capitalism, and other forms of
kyriarchy often remain key ingredients in the lyrical production of
artists purportedly queering the genre. I want to be
deliberate in identifying phenomena that we see in hip hop that
trouble our notions of what is imagined as the project of
straightness, but also remain critical about the attachment of
queer or queerness to that behavior.

In wanting to name the particular homosocial behavior of black
men in American (U.S.) hip hop culture, I offer the term
homolatent : “homo” to foreground the same gender
orientation of the behavior and “latent” to foreshadow the
“pathological” potential of queer desire’s rupture into the real.
Additionally, afrofuturist Octavia Butler’s Patternist
book series hosts characters with supernatural powers that are
activated through a painful transition process. For those who are
unable to transition successfully, their “latent” powers manifest
as a penchant for violence and nihilistic destruction waged on
those closest to them. The violent nature of homolatent
interactions sets it apart from traditional nomenclature used to
describe same-sex attraction. Unlike “queer,” “homosexual,” or
“same gender loving,” homolatent attempts to address the
abjection of desire.

In Butler’s Patternist series, a group of humans with
special powers evolves alongside the rest of humanity. These human
beings are mostly the progeny of the powerful spirit Doro, who is
on a quest to find a permanent home for his spirit in the body of
one of his breeding program stock.

In the process of breeding humans with special powers to find
his permanent body home, Doro creates many “failures,” magical
human beings who are unable to come into their powers. At the
moment they should transition they do not. Latents are depressed,
self-harming, and violent individuals whose inability to express
their powers turns them into both imploding and exploding creatures
that enjoy causing pain. It is this idea of latency, as repressed
and thus pressurized power, which informs my thinking about
intermasculine interaction in hip hop culture.

We are introduced to latents in the first book of Butler’s
series. Latents have superhuman powers but don’t transition into
harnessing them or don’t transition well. Doro uses them to sire
more children with special abilities, but because they are never in
control, he is not invested in their survival. Clay is a latent and
his brother Seth is not. Clay is jumpy, often angry, and unable to
hold down a steady job. He gets flashes of what other people are
thinking and cannot control the noise of other people’s thoughts
invading his psyche. The visceral experience of...

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